Science at Collins

Transportation  is the focus of the Live Green challenge’s second week. The photo at left  is linked to a list of selected books at Collins Library on the topic.

You’ll find statements of the problems, new designs and directions for vehicle design, and assessments of urban transportation planning. Check one of them out, or search our catalog for more.

Waste reduction is the focus of the Live Green challenge’s second week. Click on the photo at left to see a list of selected books at Collins Library on the topic.

Selections range from a new industrial design ethos, to the story of a man who studies the vast island of trash in the Pacific, to practical actions you can take now as a consumer and a member of a university to reduce waste, to the surprising afterlife of garbage. Check one of them out, or search our catalog for more.

February is Live Green Challenge month at University of Puget Sound, and Collins Library is looking to live green, too! After all, what idea could be more sustainable than a library, where many people are able to share the same resources.

We invite you to visit the library during the month of February to see our display in support of the Live Green Challenge. Stop by the Learning Commons on the main floor to find reading suggestions and a place to leave a green resolution (on re-used paper, of course!).

Keep an eye on this blog, too—each week this month we’ll release a list of selected great titles on that week’s Live Green theme! This week, browse a list of selected books on energy and energy conservation by clicking on the post’s illustration.

The Department of Energy’s Information Bridge Search engine is a great way to get into the government-published energy literature. And now, you can quickly assess whether retrieved items are of interest by automatically generating word clouds in your search results. Just hover your mouse over the item’s title or PDF file, and a cloud of the most commonly used words in the text will pop up:

Not quite as precise as an abstract, perhaps, but definitely a quicker way to suss out the material than by opening each PDF manually to find the one you want.

Look in the left hand bar of Information Bridge searches, as well, to find subject clusters and authors to narrow down your search:

Or try it yourself:

We’re testing out a new database called GREENR, aimed at Environmental Policy & Decision Making research. It features scholarly and popular articles, a search interface, and topical portals.

Check it out at our Trial Databases page, and send us your feedback!

The third week in November is Geographic Awareness Week, and contains, smack in the middle, national GIS day, so I wanted to highlight some of the geographic information resources we have here at Collins, since geography is so much a part of many scientific investigations.

Check out some of the resources at Collins, and some of the materials that are available online, at the Geographic Information page.

I think the National Environmental Atlas is particularly exciting—you can build and browse maps in eleven categories, spanning from the biology of invasive species to Congressional Districts.

• Adelman, Larry, Llewellyn Smith, Vital Pictures, National Minority Consortia, and California Newsreel, eds. 2008. Unnatural causes [videorecording] : Is inequality making us sick?. Widescreen format ed. San Francisco, Calif.: California Newsreel.
• Armstrong, F. A., and Katherine M. Blundell, eds. 2007. Energy– beyond oil. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
• Clover, Charles. 2006. The end of the line : How overfishing is changing the world and what we eat. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Creighton, Sarah Hammond. 1998. Greening the ivory tower : Improving the environmental track record of universities, colleges and other institutions. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
• Jeans, Christopher,Producer., Julian Sabath Editor., Television Trust for the Environment, United Nations Environment Programme, and Films for the Humanities & Sciences, eds. 2006. H₂O [videorecording] : Hilltops-2-oceans. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities & Sciences.
• Opie, John. 1998. Nature’s nation : An environmental history of the United States. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
• Roberts, Peter, Joe Ravetz, and Clive George, eds. 2009. Environment and the city. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.
• Santiago, Myrna I. 2006. The ecology of oil : Environment, labor, and the mexican revolution, 1900-1938. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Schnaiberg, Allan, and Kenneth Alan Gould, eds. 2000. Environment and society : The enduring conflict. Caldwell, N.J.: Blackburn Press.

• Craig, Robin Kundis, and Environmental Law Institute, eds. 2009. The Clean Water Act and the Constitution : Legal structure and the public’s right to a clean and healthy environment. 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Environmental Law Institute.
• Mills, Robin M. 2008. The myth of the oil crisis : Overcoming the challenges of depletion, geopolitics, and global warming. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
• Radkau, Joachim, and Thomas Dunlap, eds. 2008. Nature and power : A global history of the environment. 1st English ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Saha, Kshudiram. 2008. The earth’s atmosphere : Its physics and dynamics. Berlin: Springer.

The western tanager is only one of the many species (and, indeed classes) represented in the Western Soundscape Archive, a digital collection at the University of Utah. The Archive contains streaming audio and image files of about 80% of the West’s bird species, 90% of the frog and toad species, and many mammal and reptile species.  Species are searchable or browsable by common or Latin name.

Moreover, each species entry includes information extracted from NatureServe Explorer, including conservation status, distribution, and a brief overview of the species’ ecology and life history (including citations).

Additionally, the National Park Service has made numerous spectrograms  collected over the past 20 years available through the Archive. These files, created from sound monitoring projects around the country’s national parks, have been largely inaccessible to the public until now. However, now that they’ve been released, they provide graphic visual snapshots of the sound environment that can be used to analyze acoustic patterns revealing behaviour patterns,  sound pollution, and more.

Biology students may find this resource useful as a source of data for analysis, before field exercises, when studying biodiversity or as a way of starting investigations into particular species or ecosystems.

• Anderson, Terry Lee, and Laura E. Huggins, eds. 2008. Greener than thou : Are you really an environmentalist?. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press.
• Broecker, Wallace S., and Robert Kunzig, eds. 2009. Fixing climate : What past climate changes reveal about the current threat–and how to counter it. New York: Hill and Wang.
• Coley, David A. 2008. Energy and climate change : Creating a sustainable future. Chichester, West Sussex ; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
• Dawson, Brian, and Matt Spannagle, eds. 2009. The complete guide to climate change. London ; New York: Routledge.
• de Villiers, Marq. 2008. The end : Natural disasters, manmade catastrophes, and the future of human survival. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.
• Faber, Daniel. 2008. Capitalizing on environmental injustice : The polluter-industrial complex in the age of globalization. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Freyfogle, Eric T., and Dale Goble, eds. 2009. Wildlife law : A primer. Washington, DC: Island Press.
• Goleman, Daniel. 2009. Ecological intelligence : How knowing the hidden impacts of what we buy can change everything. 1st ed. New York: Broadway Books.
• H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics,and the Environment, ed. 2008. The state of the nation’s ecosystems 2008 : Measuring the lands, waters, and living resources of the United States. Washington, DC: Island Press.
• Hoekstra, Arjen Y., and Ashok K. Chapagain, eds. 2008. Globalization of water : Sharing the planet’s freshwater resources. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
• Houghton, Sir John. 2009. Global warming : The complete briefing. 4th ed. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Jacobsen, Rowan. 2008. Fruitless fall : The collapse of the honey bee and the coming agricultural crisis. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury.
• Kresic, Neven. 2009. Groundwater resources : Sustainability, management, and restoration. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Manheim, Frank T. 2009. The conflict over environmental regulation in the united states : Origins, outcomes, and comparisons with the EU and other regions. New York ; London: Springer.
• Masood, Ehsan, Daniel Schaffer, and Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, eds. 2006. Dry : Life without water. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Maxwell, Nancy Irwin. 2009. Understanding environmental health : How we live in the world. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett.
• Miller, Jeffrey G., Ann Powers, Nancy Long Elder, and Environmental Law Institute, eds. 2008. Introduction to environmental law : Cases and materials on water pollution control. Washington, D.C.: ELI Press Environmental Law Institute.
• Committee on Hydrology, Ecology,and Fishes of the Klamath River, National Research Council . 2008. Hydrology, ecology, and fishes of the Klamath river basin. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press.
• Powell, James Lawrence. 2008. Dead pool : Lake Powell, global warming, and the future of water in the west. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Roston, Eric. 2008. The carbon age : How life’s core element has become civilization’s greatest threat. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Walker & Co. : Distributed to the trade by Macmillan.
• Sedjo, Roger A., ed. 2008. Perspectives on sustainable resources in America. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future.
• Singer, S. Fred, and Dennis T. Avery, eds. 2007. Unstoppable global warming : Every 1,500 years. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Sproule-Jones, Mark, Carolyn Johns, and B. Timothy Heinmiller, eds. 2008. Canadian water politics : Conflicts and institutions. Montréal Québec: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
• Turney, Chris. 2008. Ice, mud and blood : Lessons from climates past. London ; New York: Macmillan.
• Weart, Spencer R. 2008. The discovery of global warming. Rev. and expand ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Wilson, Duff. 2002. Fateful harvest : The true story of a small town, a global industry, and a toxic secret. 1st Perennial ed. New York: Perennial.